Thursday, January 24, 2013

Day 1 - SE Asia: Here We Are!

I toyed with the idea of continuing on to Day 86 in the title.  Although technically today is a continuation of our ongoing trip, the three months in Sri Lanka are now complete.  It seems time to start numbering afresh.  We left Colombo airport over an hour late, at around d 2:30 am.  Somebody's computer system was down and we received boarding passes that were handwritten!

The flight itself was fine.  Ah, can you remember the days in North American air travel when food and free drinks were served?  Even in this short, 3.5 hour flight to Bangkok we dined.  The Airbus 380 had 70 rows of seats with very posh and extensive electronic flight entertainment.  I watched a some 2012 best international television advertisements and slept very little.

Of course when we got into BKK we were an hour late and every other flight must have arrived at the same time.  We waited 45 minutes in line to get our free visas.  That being said, they were efficiently processing literally thousands of people.  This was our first trip into town on the new airport train.  Very efficient, pleasant, and cheap.  (It dives home the point of how very expensive and inefficient Vancouver's Translink really is.)

We connected to the SkyTrain and checked into our hotel at about 10:00.  Then, we slept until about 4:00.

We finally walked around and ended up first getting some Thai soup.  We walked Patpong and later ate some fried rice and chicken.  I said on Facebook,
"Comforting to see that even 25 years after my first visit, vendors are still hawking fake Rolexes at the night market and bored-looking girls are still dancing in the doorways of Patpong. Oh, Bangkok!"
Chong Nonsi BTS
Chong Nonsi SkyTrain Station near our hotel in Bangkok.


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